Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

Don’t talk to anyone, she said, OK?

OK, he said. He stared at the blue devil, knowing something wonderful would happen next.

The Bulls fouled three times before the mother came back.

What next? he asked, noticing she had gotten sad. She crouched in front of him.

We’ll stay in a hotel, she said. How about that?

You said we were going to a scuzzy house, he said.

Plans have changed, she said, getting all busy with a cigarette.

With room service? He was acting excited, but he was very frightened now, by her smell, by the way she did that thing-kind of hiding her emotions in the smoke.

I can’t afford room service, she said, and wasted her cigarette beneath her heel.

In the corner of his eye he could see cartoons. That was nothing to him now.

Are you listening to me, Jay?

There’s no one else, he said. He meant, Who else could he listen to, but she understood something else and hugged him to her tightly.

What’s wrong?

I like you, Jay. Her eyes had gone all watery.

I like you, Dial, he said, but he did not want to follow her outside into the dark and shadow, beside tall buses pouring their waste into the pizza parlors. When they were walking upstairs he imagined they were going somewhere bad.

What is this?

A hotel, baby.

Not like the motel in Middletown, New York, where they stayed in the snowstorm, not the Carlyle, that’s for sure. He was gutted as a largemouth bass. Something had gone wrong.

They had to climb the stairs to find the foyer. The desk was quilted with red leather. Behind it sat a woman hooked up to a tank of gas. She took fifteen dollars in her fat ringed hand-no bath, no playing instruments of any kind. Then they walked along green corridors with long tubes of light above, and the sounds of TVs applauding from the rooms. Dial’s face was green in the hallway, then dark and shrunken inside the room. There were lace curtains, a red neon CHECKS CASHED. A single bed with a TV near the ceiling.

Not yet, she said, seeing where his attention was.

You promised.

I promised, yes. We can lie in bed and watch TV, but you must wait until I come back.

Where are you going now?

I have to do some more stuff, about the secret.

Is the secret OK?

Yes, it’s OK.

Then can I come?

Baby, if you come it won’t be a secret. I won’t be long.

She was kneeling. Looking at him. Pale. Way too close.

Just stay here, she said. Don’t let anyone inside.

And she kissed and hugged him way too hard.

After the key turned in the lock he stood beneath the television. The screen was dusty, spotted. Someone had run a finger down it.

He sat on the bed and watched the door awhile. The bedspread was pale blue and kind of crinkly, nasty. Once someone walked past. Then they came back the other way. He stayed away from the window but he could see the red wash of the CHECKS CASHED sign.

Dial had left her backpack on a chair. Its mouth was tied up with a piece of cord but you could still see some stuff inside-her book and a box of something small and bright like candy. That was what he went for, naturally, fishing it out with just two fingers. UNO is one of the world’s most popular family card games-he read this-with rules easy enough for kids, but challenges and excitement for all ages. He dropped the Uno back inside the pack, thinking she did not know her son.

The TV was beyond his reach.

He dragged across a chair and sat on it, still looking up. He could see the small red button. POWER.

A woman in high heels clattered down the hallways, laughing, crying maybe. He climbed up on the chair and pushed the button.

He was real close as the picture got called up from the tube, gathering itself and puffing out until it almost tore his eyes.

He saw the picture, did not understand who was sending it-there he was, him, Che Selkirk, at Kenoza Lake, New York, holding up a largemouth bass and squinting. The sound was roaring. Everything was gold and bleeding orange at the edges. He turned it off, and heard it suck back in the tube.

Something very bad had happened. He did not know what it could be.

What had gone wrong was not explained to him. Did the TV cause this or not? All Dial said was-We’ve got to go.

Tomorrow?

Right now.

When they fled Philly he had still not gotten his surprise or called his grandma. He had never been in an airplane and then he was bouncing around the sky above the earth, living in black air belonging to no place. He had flown to Oakland to a motel which turned out pretty good. He did not know exactly where he was. They did not watch TV but she read him all her book, out loud, the one with the fighting dogs. He thought The Call of the Wild must be the best book ever written. Dial never said anything but she had lived at Kenoza Lake and knew he came from a house almost identical to Buck the dog’s. The judge’s place stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around all four sides. So Jack London wrote.

They ran across the highway to the pizza place and back. They ate so much pizza the whole room smelled of it, and they played Uno together which turned out much better than you would think. He did not mention poker yet, but they played Uno for Days Inn matches.

Dial tried to call Grandma but she did not answer. The boy listened to the phone himself. It rang and rang.

When they were nearly out of cash they went to Seattle and Dial got a heap of money and after that they flew to Sydney, Australia. She told him it was a long way. He asked was the secret still OK. She said it was. He did not mind then. He beat her at poker. Then she taught him solitaire. Plus she had so many little tricks and puzzles in that pack of hers, rings you had to learn to pull apart, another book by Jack London, and all the way to Australia he was happy. He had been busted free by parents, just as Cameron had predicted.

Sydney turned out to be a big city so they got a bus to Brisbane. He got bored with that, they both did. Brisbane was really hot. Dial went looking for a head shop and he assumed it related to his dad but all that happened was they met a fat freak girl and learned that if they went north they would find places not even on a map.

Turn on, tune in, drop out, the fat girl said.

Later Dial said, I never want to hear that hippie shit again. He did not tell her Cameron said that all the time.

But Cameron could not imagine the boy hitchhiking in this world beyond the Clorox stairs-the foreign sky, bruised like cheekbones, heavy rain streaming in a distant fringe. A spooky yellow light shone on the highway and there was a fine hot clay dust, dry on the boy’s toes, mud on his now homeless tongue, powder on the needles of Pinus radiata plantations.

It was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit more or less. They kept on walking.

Two black lanes north, two lanes south, some foreign grass in the middle. To the east and west were neatly mown verges about thirty feet wide and then there were the dull green walls of the Pinus radiata plantations, sliced by yellow fire roads but deathly quiet-not a possum or a snake, not even a hopping carrion crow, could ever live there.

The boy had no idea where on earth he stood. He understood the names of hardly anything, himself included.

In this entire continent he knew only the big-faced, big-boned mother with her bag full of entertainments. She was two long strides ahead-long, long hippie skirt, T-shirt, rubber flip-flops, walking way too fast. What he really knew about her, he could have written on a candy wrapper. She was a radical, but that was as obvious as the exit sign ahead.

The boy spelled out the sign. Caboolture?